This Is 40 (Judd Apatow, 2012)

In Knocked Up, Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) played a side role to Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl’s unstably formed relationship. Mann played Heigl’s sister, and the rough patch of Pete and Debbie’s established bond ran parallel to the shaky formation of ties between the leads. Yet their arguments quickly crossed the line from the disruptions that test a relationship’s mettle to obvious, serious problems between two people clearly wrong for each other. Their eventual reconciliation is meant to show that Rogen and Heigl can and should make it too, but the desperate, artificial consolation left lingering fears of a futurish, even more nightmarish breakdown.

Enter This Is 40. Approaching their nearly simultaneous 40th birthdays, Pete and Debbie have regressed further in the last five years, their prickly resignation at spending the rest of their lives with each other now wholly removed of any evidence of true love save a few, futile lines of dialogue. In the Knocked Up DVD commentary, Apatow noted that Mann, his wife in real life, would never be able to stand Rudd’s lackadaisical, unserious approach to problems. This tension between the actual actors was visible in their supporting appearances in that film, and it seeps into every frame of this (over-)full-length examination of Pete and Debbie at a crossroads. The result is a terrifyingly toxic film in which the usual Apatow humor falls flat in the face of its nightmarish depiction of an entire family in freefall.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

With the recent demise of At the Movies, various clips of classic arguments, pans and raves have received regular play on blogs. One of the most frequently cited, and truly one of the finest moments of the program, is the hilarious split between Siskel & Ebert for the abysmal early '90s comedy Cop and a Half. Siskel, essentially speaking for the nation, hated the film, and his open-faced astonishment at Ebert's thumbs up conveyed the collective reaction of the audience. Cop and a Half became an occasional reference point in the pair's arguments for the last five years of their partnership, possibly replacing Siskel's fondness for fat jokes when looking for an easy jab at his rival.

Yet Ebert's obstinate refusal to feel bad about liking the film, even years later, reveals something important about dumb comedies: if you laugh, you've got to give them a positive write-up. And, God help me, few contemporary screen comedians make me laugh as hard as Will Ferrell. Yes, dear reader, he does the same thing in every film, and at times his shtick wears dangerously thin, but when he works, he works brilliantly. There's something enticing about coiled-spring comedy, in which a mild-mannered individual calmly reacts to the world until suddenly exploding in pent-up rage. Some excel at this (John Cleese, Jason Lee), others simply come off as deranged (Adam Sandler, to a lesser extent Chris Farley). Ferrell is one who can manage it, presenting a thick-headed veneer of unflappable confidence and pride until someone finally points out what a fool he is, setting in motion the eruption.

With Ron Burgundy, Ferrell has a prime vehicle for communicating this talent. Set in the '70s, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy draws a broad caricature of a man with the intersecting lines of the "Me Generation" and the egotistical realm of the TV personality. Ron Burgundy doesn't do any reporting or fact-checking; furthermore, he seems barely literate, only just capable of reading what's placed on a teleprompter without ever stopping to make sure what is scrolling is correct or even logical. All he has going for him is a mustache made for television, and he acts like the arbiter of truth.

Anchorman, despite being set a decade later and being released four years earlier, almost seems like a preemptive parody of Mad Men: Ron, along with his chauvinist colleagues Champ (David Koechner), Brian (Paul Rudd) and functionally retarded Brick (Steve Carell), act remarkably like Don Draper and co. They drink in the office, act as if no law can bind them and hit on every woman in the office as if there solely as a sexual outlet. So self-absorbed are the men that, when the program's boss (Fred Willard) tells the gang that the network wants more "diversity" on the news staff, Ron believes that the word refers to "an old, old wooden ship from the Civil War era."

Casting Christina Applegate as Veronica, the ambitious reporter who benefits from this rearrangement, was a stroke of genius. Applegate's talents can be hit and miss, but when she's on, she can throw back anything chucked at her by a gaggle of male comedians, even when playing the stereotypically career-driven woman who just needs the love of a boorish man to set her on the "proper" life track of a woman. That aspect of the film is as much a joke as anything else, and it's nice that Applegate's most absurd moments involve her falling for an idiot like Ron instead of the film ever trying to sell this as a positive view of relationships.

There is an intense danger in attempting to tie higher aims to films with such Neanderthal premises, but this goofy vision of '70s local news has a smart side to it. Anchorman's placement as the first in the incomplete "Mediocre American Man" trilogy was fortuitously timed to the celebration of mediocrity and incompetence that defined the zeitgeist of the Bush administration, and Bush provided Ferrell with his biggest break on Saturday Night Live. Looking back, the endless jokes on Bush's stupidity that Ferrell conveyed during the 2000 campaign seem frothy and lightweight, little jabs thrown at a man with not much background to speak of even as the governor of a state. But jump forward eight years to Ferrell's taped one-man show, in which he trotted out the Bush character for one last run before sending him out to pasture (or behind a shed). You're Welcome America had the same focal point -- Bush's astonishing ignorance even after eight years on the job -- but what had once been cheeky now seemed vicious and outraged. No longer was Ferrell amused that a moron was running for high office; now he couldn't believe that the country had allowed such a man to run riot for nearly a decade. (In the final scene, Anchorman takes this one step further by saying that Brick would go on to be one of Bush's top advisers, an act that both homages Animal House and caters to this admittedly stretched view of the movie.)

This film, made in 2004, conveys some of that disgust, far removed as it is from politics. The outrage over a woman penetrating the homoerotic inner circle ("It is anchor-MAN, not anchor-LADY, and that is a scientific fact!" screams a belligerent Champ) shows men acting like children. Nearly all of the film's humor stems from jokes at Ron's expense, from his arrogance that is unjustified by either physical attractiveness or mental acuity to his dated belief in what's proper for women. Veronica fights to be seen as an equal, resenting the fluff pieces she gets assigned to by sexist bosses, but Ron's stories are no more important. Only Ron's gravitas makes his items seem vital, but he reports on water-skiing squirrels and the odd wild animal sighting. If this film comments on the pride Americans take in ignorance, then this angle can be seen as an attack on the vacuity of news programs and their perennial inability to cover relevant topics in favor of pandering to the broadest demographic for ratings. The Channel 4 news team thinks a panda giving birth is national news in the wake of Watergate, just as CNN now devotes increasingly less time to anything important and flounders about looking for some trite human-interest piece to save ratings. Hell, even the hysterical rivalry between news channels (other factions led by Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, even Tim Robbins) resembles the incessant pissing contest between 24-hour news channels, and Channel 4's pure arrogance and pride for their drivel matches Fox's own.

Oh, but why weigh down the film with such a reading when its enjoyment lies in its absurdity and its endless one-liners? Quite so, but I believe that Anchorman's cleverness runs deeper than its surface titters. Satire, it ain't, but out of all the pictures put out by Adam McKay and his various collaborators in the subset of the Apatow talent pool, this is by far the most fully realized and insanely re-watchable, precisely because there's some overarching plan to all of this. It may not be an expulsion of the filmmakers' political angst, but the derth of a point that makes Talladega Nights only intermittently entertaining is wholly absent here. Apart from an ending that must surely have come to the gang while under the influence of controlled substances, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy remains one of the funniest and best-cast comedies of the last decade, so funny that even a long-ass collection of outtakes could be haphazardly fashioned into a "sequel" that is also riotous. Maybe it can rise no higher than the status of "lazy Sunday" film, but aren't the movies just so much better when they bring you out of boredom anyway? Stay classy.

Year One

Year One, Harold Ramis’ new, inaccurately titled comedy, suggests the pairing of the neurotic, sensitive straight man and the fat, loud-mouthed schlub is as old as history itself. Perhaps that’s why Jack Black and Michael Cera are playing to types so rigid they might as well be cast in stone.

If you’ve watched the trailer for the film – and you doubtlessly have, as it was everywhere – then you already know the plot: Black’s Zed and Cera’s Oh (get it?) live in a village in what is certainly not the first year of human existence, a village apparently in the Garden of Eden even though it’s clearly not, and they pine for Maya (Olivia Wilde) and Eema (Juno Temple), respectively.

One day, Zed eats the forbidden fruit, and soon the two friends set out to explore the world as they pledge to return as heroes to win their loves. Along the way they stumble from one Bible story to another: they meet Cain (David Cross) as he slays his brother (Paul Rudd) before stumbling across Abraham (Hank Azaria) just before he sacrifices his son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Eventually they make their way to Sodom, where the people all inexplicably speak with British accents.

After suffering through the lame hunter-gatherer jokes and the lazy Biblical references for 40 minutes, I confess I had high hopes for Sodom, which is a sad reflection of mindset at the time. Maybe in that den of unadulterated sin Ramis could at last unleash and really go for the blasphemous jugular, I thought. But no, it biggest payoff is a line like "You know what the best part of Sodom is? The sodomy," which might have been funny the hands of an anti-comic like Norm MacDonald. Delivered the uncomfortable David Cross – who has a look on his face the entire film that suggests he agreed to be in it as a fan of Ramis without reading the script – however, only accentuates its laziness.

Anyone going into this film expecting even a hint of the Ramis of old is in for a rude awakening, which is all the more bewildering given the wealth of comic talent both in front of and behind the camera. Ramis wrote the script with two Office scribes, and he collected a cast chock-full of comic heavyweights to back him up. Even if the leads are stuck in a rut, they're bankable comedy players, and David Cross is one of the finest comics of this generation.

With all that talent, how could he come up with this? Keep in mind: Harold Ramis is the person most responsible for the rise of chaos and revelry in comedy. He introduced raunch to the mainstream with his script for Animal House and his partnerships with Bill Murray represent, for many, the standard of cynical, skewed comedy. Judd Apatow in particular owes his career to Ramis, which might explain why he would finance such a terrible script. Then again, maybe it exerted the same strange influence over him as it apparently did the others.

It doesn’t help that Cera and Black are playing their old shtick: Cera is ironically detached, while Black doesn’t read his lines so much as boisterously proclaim them like a drunken William Shatner. Occasionally, he simply devolves into noises and funny faces. Why not just jangle keys for us, too? I miss the days when Jack Black had a handle on his manic energy, when he funneled it into an unassuming man who could suddenly burst into a rage over the most trivial of subjects. That character was funny in High Fidelity, even the over-the-top School of Rock. Now, he's just as sad self-parody, shouting these terrible lines in the hops that he'll make them amusing (he received his master's degree at the Dane Cook School of Comedy).

And as shoddy as the script is, Ramis’ direction fares no better: for some reason, he devotes most of the shots of this epically scaled comedy to close-ups, as if he was desperate to get a reaction, any reaction, out of the bored actors. He's never been the greatest director in the world, but he knew a thing or two about placement and how to set up for a joke. I saw short films made by high-schoolers at a school festival that had a better sense of direction that a man with 30 years of experience.

I take notes when I go to the theater, obviously so I don't have to remember every little thing when I get back home to write. But after about the halfway mark of this film, my scribbles devolved into such chaos as and entire page with the word "Why?" pasted all over it. I offered theories as to why and how Ramis could have fallen so far; the sanest of the bunch simply reads, "Have aliens killed Harold Ramis and worn his flesh to undermine the comedic bedrock of America to weaken us for eventual invasion? (possible)." Several pages I tore up on the way out, for fear that their content might be incriminating in some states. At no point did I manage to convince myself that a single moment was funny.

Year One is clearly shooting to be a piece of satirical blasphemy à la Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but it can’t even hit the simpler parody of History of the World Part I: it’s filled to the ceiling of its PG-13 rating with sodomy, circumcision and gay jokes – Olvier Platt’s turn as a high priest makes Ken Jeong’s mincing mobster from The Hangover look like a character from The Wire – yet Ramis is just wary enough of incurring any protests that he plays it frustratingly safe. You can't half-ass blasphemy: if you're going to mock the Bible's inconsistencies and absurdities, you better be ready to go all-out, not to turn them into sad, repetitive gags.

Yes, for all its gross-out gags, the only bold aspect of the entire film was the decision to include a blooper reel, as the thought of watching the crew having a good time with this after torturing us for 97 minutes is just insulting. At least the cast has the decency to look as bored in these candid moments as they do in the final product. It is truly the Paris Hilton sex tape of blooper reels.

In his now-legendary review for North, Roger Ebert listed director Rob Reiner's previous achievements as "incantations" against that infamous turkey. If that offered even a moment's consolation, I strongly suggest that anyone unfortunate enough to spend $10 on this piece of trash repeat "Ghostbusters, Stripes, Animal House, Groundhog Day, Caddyshack" ad nauseam. Better yet, lock arms with your miserable brethren, in the hopes that, collectively, your tribal chanting can drown out the primitive nonsense of this tripe. Make no mistake: Year One is an abominable failure, and the nadir of Ramis’ career. He should be grateful that McG ruined the Terminator franchise just a few weeks ago, as that's the only thing keeping him from having the worst film of the year.

I Love You, Man

Jason Segel established himself as the dark horse of the Apatow crew last year with the incredible Forgetting Sarah Marshall, far and away the best of the slew of Apatow-produced (and occasionally directed) films to come from the thinktank of former Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared staff and stars. Now he almost single-handed buoys the best of the lesser Apatow works; you know, the ones with which Apatow has barely more than a passing involvement.

The plot of I Love You, Man is both brilliance in simplicity and a big risk: at the start of the film, Peter (Paul Rudd) proposes to his love Zooey (Rashida Jones) and she says yes. But their post-engagement high does not last, as wedding preparations reveal that Peter has no steady male friends to invite to the wedding. Fearing the bridesmaids will have nothing to do but sit around awkwardly, Peter attempts to drum up some guy friends. Rudd plays Peter as a man who wants to be relaxed and cool but spends too much time trying; the actor's got a lot of charm, and it's impressive to see him twist it into awkward humor.

The result is a surprisingly sly take on the average romantic comedy. Peter uses all of the avenues we usually see characters using to find a mate: he looks around the gym and the office, to no avail. His gay brother (Andy Samberg), who chases straight men for the challenge, sets him up with a "man-date" that goes predictably yet hilariously awry. There's also the requisite gross-out gag, one that's been done to death but with a slight tweak that made the whole thing just a tad unexpected. All of this goes on for a 20-minute or so span that starts to overstay its welcome, and the film threatens to drag right out of the gate.

Then Sydney (Segel) shows up. As much the physical embodiment of what every laid-back dude wants to do but abstains from either because of fears of repercussions or a nasty case of maturity. He doesn't clean up after his dog, takes seemingly indefinite lunch breaks, and just generally speaks in the sort of aphorisms that sound really wise when you're young and cocksure but tend to lose their sheen when you actually think about them. Peter and Sydney bond over a mutual love of the Canadian prog rock band Rush, unquestionably the single best group to provide the heart of a platonic romantic comedy between two geeks.

From here the film gleefully follows every rom-com trope in the book and turns it on its side: Peter and Sydney fall into such a deep bro-love which incurs Zooey's jealousy, leading to the inevitable Big Misunderstanding that leaves all parties scattered with an uncertain-but-not-really predicament to be solved in the third act. But if it plays out in predictable tedium, that's only because it's sitting right next to you in the audience laughing at itself.

There's a fine line between comedy gold and abysmal failure when it comes to over-the-top exaggeration; for example, Step Brothers tried to filter the coming-of-age story through the lens of two middle-aged man-children, and the result was downright awful. I Love You, Man succeeds because its exaggerations are tempered by some of the sweetest and most genuine moments you'll find in a comedy these days: Peter's scenes with Zooey never once feel contrived and manage to convey Peter's dopey charm without seeming kitschy (mainly thanks to Paul Rudd's natural charisma). The three leads are helped along by a terrific supporting cast (including the aforementioned Samberg, professional straight-man J.K. Simmons as Peter's dad and Jon Favreau and Jaime Pressley as a perennially-bickering couple), who only make a great film even funnier. I Love You, Man is far from perfect, but it's one of the funnier films in recent memory, and it's worth the price of admission if for no other reason than to see Paul Rudd and Jason Segel jam to old Rush tunes.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin- Unrated Version

I swear, every time I sit down with this film, I have this preconceived notion that it's not quite as funny as people claim, that I think its edge has dulled a bit, then I actually watch the film and laugh as hard as I did the first time. If you held a gun to my head and demanded I explain why I continue to think the film will hold nothing for me when it always keeps me completely entertained, I'd have no answer for you. While Forgetting Sarah Marshall may very well eclipse 40YOV as the chief representative of Apatow Productions in my book, this will likely stand as the best thing Apatow himself directed for some time to come.

Based on a concept originally conceived by Steve Carell in his Second City days, The 40-Year-Old Virgin is one of those films that tells you everything you need to know right in the title. Carell plays the lead, Andy Stitzer, a genial, socially awkward nerd who works the stockroom of an electronics store. He knows all the ins and outs of the hardware, but he's too shy to be a salesman. At home, his walls are packed with mint condition action figures worth a small fortune, but of course he'd never sell them. He's bit of a stereotypical nerd, yes, but with enough charm to at least bend the archetype if not break free of it.

At work, his colleagues waver between sympathy for Andy's maladjustment and fear that he might one day kill them all. After all, he looks like the last person in the world who'd snap, and those are the ones you have to keep an eye on. Eventually David (Paul Rudd), Cal (Seth Rogen) and Jay (Romany Malco) invite him to a poker game, where they all end up sharing lurid stories of past sexcapades, and press Andy for an anecdote of his own. At last, the truth comes out: Andy's still a virgin.

For the rest of the film, these three do everything in their power to get their new pal laid: they teach Andy how to interact with women and how to attract them, but Andy resists. Most of the information he gets from his friends is emotionless and sexist, designed solely to lead to a one-night stand, but he wants an actual relationship. Nevertheless, he does follow his friends to clubs and even manages to pick up a thoroughly trashed young woman (played by Leslie Mann) and ride home with her in an achingly funny scene.

Slowly his friends bring out some confidence in Andy, and he not only lands a spot on the sales floor but meets Trish (Catherine Keener), a sweet woman who runs a store across the street that sells people's unwanted junk on Ebay. Why would anyone use a middleman for Ebay? No one knows, and it's a recurring joke, though thankfully it only gets mentioned a few times. Trish is roughly the same age as Andy and a mother of three, one of whom has a child of her own. Though the two hit it off and she wants to sleep with Andy, sex isn't high on her list of priorities, either.

The middle sags a bit, as it apparently must with AP movies, but then again I'm watching the unrated cut. I never got to see this in theaters because of age limits, so I made do with the DVD.* Several scenes, chiefly the Date-a-Palooza, drag on to get in repetitive gags that weren't even that funny to begin with. I also have a beef with Kat Denning's character. Since the film I've come to enjoy her, but her character here forces her to be in hysterics the whole time spouting absolute nonsense to her mother like "How come you get to have sex when I can't?!" which is nightmarishly stupid even by self-absorbed teenager standards. She eventually bottoms out into a likable character, but it's evidence of the weak female roles that populate most of the films Apatow puts his name to these days.

Nevertheless, even in this extended version--17 minutes longer than the original cut--The 40-Year-Old Virgin is well-paced and screamingly funny from start to finish. If Knocked Up contains just enough laughs to be worth it, this goes above and beyond the call of duty. Only one or two scenes really falter, and the rest get across both laughs and heart without having to gear-shift between them. Apart from Dennings' bawling teen brat (I refuse to blame her for what was simply a bad character) and Keener's narrowly-defined role, everyone puts in great work and every character (even Dennings') gets at least one big laugh. There are a few obvious moments--like Andy's saccharine lines to Trish near the end-- but overall the film achieves a great balance between the filth and the sugar, and damned if I'm not entertained every time.


*I know that Blu-Ray versions of the film come with both versions, and if you want to send me money for a PS3 I'll happily upgrade.

Role Models

In a year already packed with great comedies from Ben Stiller (“Tropic Thunder”), Kevin Smith (“Zack & Miri Make A Porno”), and Apatow Productions (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Pineapple Express”) a little movie about two friends who find themselves in a court-ordered charity that pairs volunteers with maladjusted children sounds like just another attempt to cash in on those aforementioned talents. Surprisingly, “Role Models” more than holds its own in this riotous comedy.

The film opens with Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Sean William Scott) working as pitchmen for an energy drink company. As per the strict regulations of buddy comedy, they are polar opposites; Wheeler is a laid-back lothario who adores his job because of its simplicity, while Danny is confrontational and bitter.

After a particularly hellish day, the pair find themselves on the verge of a prison sentence and Danny finds himself without a girlfriend. To avoid jail, the two head to the aforementioned charity Sturdy Wings, founded by Gayle Sweeney (Jane Lynch), an ex-con and recovered addict. Danny gets paired up with a fantasy-absorbed teen named Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse of McLovin fame), and Wheeler gets matched to the terrible tyke Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson).

Naturally, nobody gets along at first. Danny is uncomfortable with Augie’s obsession with capes and foam swords and a strange club of like-minded nerds that plays like a Renaissance Faire in which everyone fights one another, while Ronnie simply views Wheeler as the latest toy to break. Eventually, they come to respect and even love one another and everyone learns something about themselves. This could have easily devolved into cliché, but “Role Models” rises above thanks to its inventive humor.

Foul-mouthed children is hardly a new concept to R-rated comedy, but the frequency with which Ronnie drops F-bombs is surprising. He’s so vulgar and self-assured you can almost believe that Wheeler would take him to an adult party and that he would fit in. Scott puts in his finest work since the first “American Pie, and Paul Rudd- adept at playing off others- manages to have chemistry with everyone. Jane Lynch plays Gayle like a person who never really recovered from addiction, to the point that, even in total sobriety, you find yourself wondering if she is using.

But once again it’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse who steals the show by making a devotion to a real life World of Warcraft actually touching and for getting in some memorable lines. Indeed, his hobby becomes the gag on which the movie hinges; Augie’s struggle to fit in and to win his parent’s acceptance is the closest this film comes to depth.

The film has obviously been cut down for ratings and time purposes. The problem is that they seem to have cut out all the transitions. The gang go from mortal enemies to dear friends over the course of…what? They just do. There’s not even a montage, for God’s sake. Likewise, Dany’s girlfriend (played by Elizabeth Banks) and Ronnie’s mother are terribly underdeveloped even though they seem like they could have easily been interesting characters. Such editing gives the movie a choppy feeling, and it exists more as a series of gags than a cohesive film.

Still, there’s no denying the funniness of “Role Models.” It’s half-hearted attempt at depth fails, but that cannot bring down the constant laughs. Scott reminds us why we used to love him, and Mintz-Plasse proves he is the king of the nerds. It’s not as funny or rewarding as “Zack & Miri,” but that’s no reason not to see this hilarious flick.